News Pick – A Trump dividend for Canada? Maybe in its A.I. industry – NYT

May 9, 2017 – “Amir Moravej, an Iranian computer engineer in Montreal, quietly worked last year on building software to help people navigate the Canadian immigration system. He saw it as a way for others to avoid the same immigration travails he suffered a few years earlier. Then came the American presidential election. “Trump accelerated everything,” said Mr. Moravej, 33, the chief executive of a software start-up named Botler AI. With immigration taking center stage in American politics and elsewhere, Botler AI began putting more resources into building a chatbot tailored to one of Canada’s immigration programs. On Wednesday, the start-up plans to announce that Yoshua Bengio, a research pioneer in artificial intelligence and director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, is joining the fledgling company as a strategy adviser. Mr. Bengio is adding his intellectual firepower to ease the way for what could become a migration of high-tech talent. Canada stands to benefit from the American political climate and the Trump administration’s efforts — stalled in court so far — to sharply restrict travel into the United States from six predominantly Muslim nations. After Mr. Trump’s election, applications to Canada for student and temporary visas surged.” Read more at The New York Times